Energid to work on TARDEC UGV programme

Energid Technologies will develop digital simulation to enable safety testing of autonomous military convoys as part of a programme managed by the US Tank Automotive Research, Development, and Engineering Center (TARDEC).

Energid will develop a solution to enable unmanned road vehicle control software to be tested for safety to the level required for fielding. This is a typically expensive and time consuming task that is currently a barrier to the deployment of autonomous vehicles in most real-world environments.

James English, CTO, Energid, said: ‘It is the cost and difficulty of guaranteeing safety that has prevented autonomous vehicles from being used as much as we would hope and expect.’

To overcome this challenge, Energid's method applies autonomy algorithms to simulated vehicles in a way that actively seeks out problems. By combining randomised dynamic simulation with optimisation for finding algorithmic failures, safety issues can be detected earlier and at reduced cost. 

Ryan Penning, senior engineer at Energid, said: ‘Energid's software will find those one-in-a-million events that rarely happen but have serious consequences when they do. Understanding and removing these hazards is critical.

‘We have powerful software technologies to simulate vehicle movement and wheel-road interaction. Through this project, we will apply them with the goal of large-scale acceptance and use of autonomous vehicles.’

Energid's software uses a novel architecture with powerful algorithms for simulating both sensor data and the dynamics of articulated bodies. 

The work will apply computational methods the company developed previously for NASA, the US Department of Defense, and the US National Science Foundation; and will leverage Energid's Actin and Selectin commercial robotics software toolkits, which have been used to design, control, and simulate advanced robotic systems.